Birdwatchers, environmentalists and gardeners will be treated to a readable feast of stocking fillers this Christmas, writes Michael Viney
'We are born," insists Harvard University's Piotr Nasrecki, "without fear of nature." Shivers about spiders or beetles are passed on from our elders or linger in our genes from more primitive avoidances. Either way, we seem ripe for a change in the Western relationship with nature. As wildlife on television exhausts the private lives of lions and elephants and brings smaller and smaller creatures into focus, nature books for Christmas keep pace.
With The Smaller Majority, (Harvard University Press, $35) Nasrecki, a conservation biologist and a magical photographer, has produced a dazzling experience, not only for nature enthusiasts but for anyone inspired by colour and design. Hundreds of small creatures were photographed in tropical forests, savannahs and deserts across the globe. Among chameleons and katydids are life forms stranger than anything on distant planets, yet their lessons in biology often hold true in one's own back garden.
A passion for tiny things is shared by Sir David Attenborough, and it inspires his seventh film exploration of life on Earth. The series, Life in the Undergrowth began on BBC1 in November, and the creatures put under surveillance by tiny lenses and thermal imaging also patter and wriggle through the book (BBC Books, £20). Metre-long earthworms and centipedes with the strength of pythons are among the bizarre giants in Attenborough's chronicle of life at the bottom of the physical scale.
Bizarre and gosh-provoking lifestyles are also the substance of Mark Carwardine's Extreme Nature (HarperCollins, £30), a large format, lavishly-illustrated book divided into four sections: Extreme Growth, Extreme Abilities, Extreme Movement and Extreme Families. This is nature tailored to human amazement - "the world's most devious plant, the largest flock of birds, the biggest drug user" - but some useful understanding should rub off between the gasps.
The spectacular images in these books can set up yearnings in any amateur nature photographer - today's equivalent of the Victorian collector and shooter. But while Nasrecki's observations on his craft may be especially useful in, say, a rainforest, the photographer in Ireland will prize The Complete Guide to Close-up & Macro Photography (David and Charles, £22.50). Robert Thompson of Co Down is master of the exquisite close-up, whether of dragonflies, moths, woodland flowers or fungi, and this is a generous and beautiful manual on how to follow, so to speak, in his knee-marks. Along with expert advice on cameras and lenses comes fieldcraft born of a long immersion in nature, plus stunning examples of his work. Sixteen Irish wildlife photographers each get a thumbnail profile at the end of Ireland's Mammals, having added much interest and beauty to Juanita Browne's timely production. Browne, a zoologist, was editor of the excellent if sadly short-lived Wild Ireland magazine and she gives a clear and thorough account of the 38 or so mammal species that share our island and its waters. The book is an enrichment to family shelf or classroom and is sold directly for €27 from Browne Books, Ballysax, The Curragh, Co Kildare (e-mail info@irishwildlife.ie).
The Irish mountain hare, as Browne tells us, has been around for at least 28,000 years (the date of its earliest fossil bones, found in Co Waterford) and it takes its place with its relatives in Europe, North America and Africa in Jill Mason's The Hare (Marlin Unwin, £20), the first thorough portrait of the animal in some decades. It explains the hare's behaviour through the seasons and is illustrated with photographs by the author's husband.
The birdwatcher's bumper book of the year, if anything so stylish can be called that, has to be Birds Britannica (Chatto & Windus, £35) by Mark Cocker. This is a companion volume to Richard Mabey's earlier and brilliant Flora Britannica (see Nature Cure, below), and follows the same idea of bringing current culture and folklore into thorough accounts of species.
Cocker's engrossing text includes the observations of more than 1,000 naturalists and bird-lovers. Don't be put off by the "Brit" bit; even if we don't have nightingales, Irish references abound and the illustration is fabulous.
A FULL BOOK about one kind of bird can be scientifically admirable, but sometimes heavy going. Merlins of the Wicklow Mountains (Currach Books, €14.99) is thoroughly engaging throughout. Conservation ranger Anthony McElheron, who lives in Greystones, Co Wicklow, has spent countless hours of close observation in a 20-year obsession with Ireland's smallest falcons. His graphic and sometimes passionate writing explores their private lives and survival in the changing uplands. Fine photographs complement his story.
Away from all the glossy camera work, the Bedside Book of Birds, by Graeme Gibson (Bloomsbury, £20), is a visually ravishing fistful in other ways. Gibson is a Canadian novelist and ornithologist intrigued by the human response to birds. He offers shrewdly-chosen fragments, from Aeschylus to Ted Hughes, Plato to Bruce Chatwin, Inuit tales to the fantasy of Flann O'Brien ("I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip landrail . . ."). It is decorated with similarly eclectic and arresting illustrations, from Audubon to New Zealand folk art.
"Birds live at the edge of my life," says award-winning Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. "That's okay. I like the sense that the margins of my life are semipermeable." Peregrines scream above her home in Fife, corncrakes wait on a visit to the Isle of Coll. In Findings (Sort of Books, £6.99), her excursions in the cause of "paying heed" to nature have yielded memorable and totally modern essays.
Richard Mabey, England's finest nature writer, had to live in a minor key for a few years recently, crushed by depression (the loss of his proper central role in the aforementioned Birds Britannica was just one consequence). He found himself "clotted with rootedness" and eventually wrenched himself out of a family house beside the wooded Chilterns to settle again in the flatlands of East Anglia. As he relates in Nature Cure (Chatto & Windus, £16), he was eventually revived by "a sense of being taken, not out of myself but back in, of nature entering me, firing up the wild bits of my imagination." A fresh idea of East Anglia is just one of the reader's rewards.
Edward O'Regan had his young and golden years in the countryside of wartime Ireland. His holidays, with trusted friend, were spent in adventures with a collapsible canoe on the rivers, lakes and canals of the midlands, where the only sounds in an unpolluted, car-less idyll were those of water, fish and birds. Irish Waterways (Currach Press, €12.99) is properly described as a classic in Dick Warner's preface, and black-and-white snapshots of the time add to its atmosphere.
ONE OF THE few places to find "a transcendental level of calm" in today's Ireland is at the summits of mountains. Paul Clements, a BBC journalist of circumnavigating compulsions, did it the (relatively) easy way by taking his elderly car as near as he could get to the highest point in every Irish county. It was, as the title jokes, The Height of Nonsense (Collins Press, €13.95), but enchanted summits were his reward for 12,870km (8,000 miles) and some heroic manoeuvres on vertiginous hairpin bends.
The land between high and low tides is, perhaps, our last real stretch of accessible wilderness. Above it, the coastal littoral has its own distinctive human heritage. In Ireland's Coastline (Collins Press, €30) Richard Nairn celebrates both, having travelled much of the island's 8,000km (4,970 miles) of shoreline, as nature warden, ornithologist, student of seals and environmental consultant. His comprehensive knowledge informs a most handsome book, enriched by aerial and underwater photographs.
The human debt to trees has inspired two practised and enthusiastic natural history writers, one each side of the Atlantic. In The Secret Life of Trees (Allen Lane, £20), Colin Tudge is mainly concerned about the science of their growth, adaptation and survival, but he matches their often incredibly long lives to the story of human dependence on timber and its products. Every age, as he says, has been a wood age, including our own.
William Bryant Logan lives and gardens in Brooklyn, but reaches across the temperate regions for his eulogy to Oak: the Frame of Civilization (Norton, £17). Like Tudge, he traces the tree's indispensable value to humanity (acorns, he argues, were the world's first staple), and the oak's own colonising adventures and support for other wildlife. His special feeling for craftsmanship distinguishes an account of the building of the roof of Westminster Abbey - an epic episode in the story of Irish oak.
Even humans - to conclude - have a natural history. The recent discovery of a new hobbit-sized human species in an Indonesian cave has added a fascinating tangent to modern human origins. A dapper Homo floresiensis hunter, giant rat draped across his shoulder, takes his place in The Complete World of Human Evolution (Thames & Hudson, £25). Between prolific illustrations, researchers Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews bring a 20-million-year story up to the minute.